Surreal

It was a very average night with Andey. I called him as he was driving home from work and told him that I would not be able to see him tonight. He drove home to find me waiting on the porch. It was a short deception that yielded a nice surprise for him. We hung out, talked about Interpol and Longfellow. At a late hour, I told him I needed to go home. What 3 hours had made the night normal would not compensate for the next 5 minutes that made the evening surreal.

When we stepped outside, there was a police car parked in front of Andey's house. Slightly down the way there was another police car and two police officers talking. We get inside the car and make our way back to my apartment. Not two blocks from his house, we see a bunch of cars lining a narrow residential street. As we're driving, Andey sees his brother. There is no room for him to pull out of the street, but he wants to say, "Hello." I'm very tired and it immediately becomes difficult to concentrate on the conversation between Andey and his brother. Something about the Red Sox. I sort of stare out the front window at the street in front of me. We are stopped in the middle of the street about halfway down a block in a neighborhood. At the end of the block, I see a car speed around a corner and plow through yard and stright into a white Ford Taurus. It happened so suddenly, that I had difficultly grasping the situation.

The speed and the angle that the vehicle hit showed that this could not have been a substance free accident. Billows of smoke or dust from the crash sort of lingered around the white Taurus, but from behind that car I begin to see headlights. The speeding car was moving and now looking for a quick escape--an escape that would lead naturally to us. I start gently hitting Andey's arm and say, "Dear, you need to move. You need to move, like, right now! We need to move!" Sure as my expectation, this black demon twisted from the first impact comes barreling down the street directly for us. We were not stopped in the middle of the road for no reason. The lines of cars parked for partying did not leave room for us to just pull aside. There was only room for a single car to drive through. With the maniac in front of us, Andey responds, "Yeah" to my frantic commands and throws the car into reverse. He is able to pull back far enough that there is room to the right of us if the other car wished to drive by. Our hopes of remaining safe depended on whether this car would slow down enough to pass to the left. Having seen the wrecked vehicle bump into other cars on its way, this was not a promising prospect. And so there it was, the black shape of a vehicle, with headlights pointed directly at me. It turned. It turned.

In the moment of my relief, I though maybe I should turn to get the tag number. But, as I turned, I saw the man in the passenger window waving his arms outside of the window. My window was open. If I had reached out my hand, I could have touched him. I shivered and pulled my body away from the concept of such closeness to something that not three seconds ago terrified me. I threw my books I was carrying with me to the floor and jumped out of the vehicle that had trapped me in front of that fiend. We ran to the street corner to see where he went. Why? I wanted to leave. Go home. Sleep. A girl with a tape recorder ran around asking questions. A young woman replies to the question, "What did you think about the crash" with "I just can't believe that guy threw his car in reverse and backed through all those cars. That was fucking amazing." I want to leave. Why are we talking? Let's go home.

And I stand there watching the social nature of people talking about an accident. They want to tell you what they saw. They want you to tell them what you saw. I do not care. It just occured to me that the choice to leave at the time we did, the choice to yell at Andey's brother from the car, which kept us in the middle of the street, put us in danger of being hit. The choice to tell him to move, the choice to put the car in reverse, and then the choice of the other driver to turn to miss us made the danger disappear. But I still stood there afraid. Let's go home.